BACKGROUND – UNDERSTANDING BLOCKCHAIN

Nobody did know until Satoshi emerged out of nowhere. In fact, nobody believed it was even possible.

Only few peoples known that Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown inventor of Bitcoin, the first and still most important cryptocurrency, never intended to invent a currency. In his announcement of Bitcoin in late 2008, Satoshi said he developed “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.“ His goal was to invent something; many people failed to create before digital cash.

The single most important part of Satoshi‘s invention was that he found a way to build a decentralized digital cash system. In the nineties, there have been many attempts to create digital money, but they all failed. After seeing all the centralized attempts fail, Satoshi tried to build a digital cash system without a central entity. Like a Peer-to-Peer network for file sharing. This decision became the birth of cryptocurrency. They are the missing piece Satoshi found to realize digital cash. The reason why is a bit technical and complex, but once we get it, we will know about cryptocurrencies than most people do. So, let‘s try to make it as easy as possible.

To realize digital cash we need a payment network with accounts, balances, and transaction. That‘s easy to understand. One major problem every payment network has to solve is to prevent the so-called double spending: to prevent that one entity spends the same amount twice. Usually, this is done by a central server who keeps record about the balances.

In a decentralized network, we don‘t have this server. So we need every single entity of the network to do this job. Every peer in the network needs to have a list with all transactions to check if future transactions are valid or an attempt to double spend. But how can these entities keep a consensus about this records? If the peers of the network disagree about only one single, minor balance, everything is broken. They need an absolute consensus. Usually, we take, again, a central authority to declare the correct state of balances. But how can we achieve consensus without a central authority?

Nobody did know until Satoshi emerged out of nowhere. In fact, nobody believed it was even possible.

Satoshi proved it was. His major innovation was to achieve consensus without a central authority. Cryptocurrencies are a part of this solution – the part that made the solution thrilling, fascinating and helped it to roll over the world.